Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: All platforms
URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:
Description of need: Describe the iNaturalist community need that your requested feature addresses. Include screenshots, URLs, and other details to help us all understand the issue.
I think that many of the colors, especially the ones for vertebrates, are too similar and can be difficult to tell apart. This might also be a problem for people with color deficiencies, who may have even more trouble differentiating the colors.
Feature request details: In detail, describe the feature you are requesting. This includes its functionality, where the feature is implemented, and what it might look like. Screenshots or mock-ups are helpful. The idea is to have a concrete and actionable request which the community can discuss and vote on. It might change through discussion, but it’s much easier to iterate and talk about something specific.
I think some of the vertebrate taxon should either get new colors, or a wider and more easily separable variety of blues. I think some colors like these might be better:
Chromista, mollusks and insects are all way too similar to each other. The same is true for Ray-finned fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and “other”
Just in case it wasn’t obvious, the graphic comes from the year in review page. Are there many other places where the colours all appear close together? The only other one I can think of is the Life List, but that also uses icons to help distinguish between high-level taxa (and of course there’s always the textual labels as well). However, it’s hard to think of a place where distinguishing between the colours alone would significantly affect usability.
It could be argued that it’s actually beneficial for sub-groups to use similar hues, as this makes it clearer which higher-level group they all belong to. The more the hues differ, the less obvious this becomes.
There is one remaining curiosity, though: why are there no yellow taxa? I thought this might be because yellow doesn’t show up well against white, but it’s used elsewhere on the site (e.g. Needs ID), so that can’t explain it.
I’m not sure I really object to all of the vertebrate animals getting similar shades of blue. Even taken together, they’re considerably less diverse than plants (which get a single hue all lumped together!), or even individual subclades of insects and fungi.
I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have similar hues, I just think that it might be helpful if they differ a bit more in order to help tell them apart.
Also, when looking at a map view of observations, it can be hard to tell what’s what without clicking on it, and that can be especially difficult when using the app.
Oh wow I honestly always assumed the blue points were just “vertebrates” in the general sense. I’d fully support a change to make the differences clearer.
As soon as I saw the post, I was sure you were going to say this. ^^
I agree though. It would be cool to have at least some more shades of green! Ideally also some other hues like yellow or a sort of turquoise. Separating mosses (s.l.), ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms seems rather intuitive even for non-botanists… And the colours don’t have to represent monophyletic taxa, as the “other animals” category shows.
I think the current colour choice is a bit weird as it is, anyway, even for animals. Vertebrates getting 5 different colours, while a lot of other huge animal taxa (Crustacea, Annelida, Echinodermata, Cnidaria etc.) are lumped together under “Other animals”.
Why not have a dedicated colour for all of Arthropoda, and one for Vertebrata. Then we could have room for one for Spiralia or at least Lophotrochozoa (though they have no named taxonomic rank), one for Cnidaria, and one for echinodermata. That would also get these taxa out of the “other animals” category.
If we went with separate hues, we could even have different shades for different sub-taxa.
I wasn’t really trying to argue against using other colours/hues, but rather trying to guess what the justification was for the current set of colours. It seems clear that a better scheme could be devised.
Hm - for some reason, I never thought of maps! Your feature request would certainly be improved if that was given as one of the main use-cases. Having said that, I can’t imagine myself actually using the colours to pick out taxa, since a filter would be far more effective. The maps might be more informative if a better distribution of colours was chosen, though.
Research generally shows that humans stop being able to accurately distinguish colors/process color information effectively at approx 7-10 different colors in graphics. This is definitely true for me personally (though I am also red-green colorblind and at the lower end of color processing). With as many categories as iNat uses, I don’t think that there’s any color scheme that will be terribly effective at communicating distributional info in a broad sense. As such, I would actually argue that fewer groupings/colors would be more effective and lumping would be preferable.
That said, since the colors are based on iNat’s iconic taxa, that probably won’t happen. If there were to be a large scale resetting of colors, someone could run a clustering algorithm on the relatedness of iNat observations and see which 7-10 groups offer the most coverage of iNat’s observations and choose those groups as the clusters to receive the different colors.
